Frequently Asked Questions

General

What does "Karora" mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karora

What is Cooee?

Cooee is a project representing a fork of the Echo2, EchopointNG and Echo2 Extras code. It also includes any fun tidbits or bugfixes we've found along the way (such as the "WidgetDash"). The main goal is to further the development of the Echo framework through greater community involvement and support. Cooee also aims to increase the speed for which issues in the framework are attended to, and new features added.

"Cooee" is an aboriginal cry for communication over long distances. In more recent times, one cries "Cooee" into hills / or alike, and waits for the return (Echoed) call.

Is karora.org in anyway associated with Karora Technologies, Inc (www.karora.com)

No - we have no association with KT Inc.

Is Karora just some facade for a commercial entity?

While Karora (like any other open source software group) has commercial support through the donation of IT Infrastructure and developer time, Karora itself is entirely independent and community driven. As such, the community is strongly encouraged to log issues, provide patches and generally help out in the overall development of Karora projects.

Will Moomba / Orana be released in Echo2 versions?

Both Moomba and Orana started thier life being built on Echo2. As such, the compatibility (around 95-98%) is still there - provided you rename the imports (or someone kindly contributes a bridging package). However at this time there is no plans to release Echo2 specific versions.

Can I contribute to the Karora projects?

Yes. Contributions to any of the Karora projects is actively encouraged. For more information on what and how, please see Contributing to the Sandbox and Bug Fixing.

Can I become a submitter to the Karora SVN repositories?

Yes. Once a user has proved their worth by assisting the development of Karora projects by raising JIRA issues along with appropriate solutions we may approach them to see if they would like to become a submitter. In addition we invite users to approach us should they feel that they are both willing and able.

Will opening up the Karora SVN repositories to more submitters make the codebase less stable?

As with any software development, the development must be managed properly if it is to be successful. We believe that we have the correct safety checks in place to ensure that the project development only goes forward. For a user to become eligible to become a submitter, they must prove that they are of sufficient quality and they must accept the procedures that are in place. Should a submitter make changes to the repository without following the correct procedure it is our policy to roll out the changes until they can learn to 'play by the rules'. If you take a look at the fisheye change log for the Cooee project you will see that we have already done this once.

General Project FAQ

Why is Cooee competing with Echo2 - it's open source as well! Why not just contribute?

Cooee is NOT here to compete with Echo2 - quite the opposite. What we're doing is trying to provide a much more open environment to stimulate the growth and acceptance of Echo2 / Cooee. We've spent a lot of time making sure that everything that happens as part of the Cooee project can directly benefit the work of Nextapp and other projects like EchoPointNG. For instance, all changes to the code base are tracked through JIRA, and marked appropriately in the commit comments. This means applying the changes / fixes we make back to Echo / EchoPointNG are exceptionally easy.  To put it simply - we want to work with Echo and maintain as much API compatibility as possible.  Not work against it.

To answer the second part of this question - why not just contribute, we've seen what happens to contributions as part of Echo2. They end up scattered across forums. The forums suddenly become used for source control, documentation and not to mention bug tracking. Basically, from what we could tell when this project was created was that the infrastructure and support for the community just wasn't there. As such the Cooee project embraces the community - any one can report bugs in our bug tracker, the wiki is here for documentation, and so on. Furthermore, through the sandbox mechanism, anyone can contribute new components with the possibility of getting them into the main Cooee branch.

Will Cooee incorporate Echo2/EPNG development?

Yes. There may be instances where changes/fixes in the Echo2/EPNG code are not compatible with the Cooee library but Karora will try to apply as many changes done to Echo2/EPNG into Cooee.

Will Cooee incorporate Echo3 development?

Right now Karora is concentrating on making the current version of Cooee (based on Echo2) more stable than it currently by applying fixes for as many currently known bugs as possible. Work will also include some minor architectural changes to make the library behave in a slightly more predictable way.
Eventually, however, we hope to incorporate the work that NextApp are doing on Echo3 into the Cooee stable. However, it is unlikely that Echo3 will not be looked at as a serious upgrade for at least 12 months.